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THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 
AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 



CamfittOse: 



PRINTED BY C; J. CLAY, M.A. 
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 



THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 
AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 

DELIVEEED BEFORE 

THE UNIVEESITY OF CAMBEIDGE. 

BY THE REV. 

CHAELES KINGSLEY, M.A. 

PEOFESSOE OF MODERN HISTORY EST THE TTNIVEESITY OP CA3EBEIDGB, 
CHAPLAIN IN OEDINAEY TO THE QUEEN, & EECTOR OF EVERSLEY. 



MACMILLAN AND CO. "^^ 

(2Dambnte: 

AND 23, HENRIETTA STEEET, COVENT GARDEN, 
I860. 

[ The Right of Translation is reserved. ] 



THE UNDERGEADUATES 



OF THE 



Bnittxiit^ 0f Camliritfse. 



THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE AS 
APPLIED TO HISTOKY. 

It is with a feeling of awe, I had ahnost 

said of fear, that I find myself in this place, 

upon this errand. The responsibility of a 

teacher of History in Cambridge is in itself 

very heavy: but doubly heavy in the case of 

one who sees among his audience many 

men as fit, it may be some more fit, to fill 

this Chair : and again, more heavy stiU, when 

one succeeds a man whose learning, like his 

virtues, I can never hope to equal. 

But a Professor, I trust, is like other men, 

capable of improvement; and the great law, 

docendo disces, may be fulfilled in him, as in 

other men. Meanwhile, I can only promise 

that the whole of such small powers as I 

1 



2 'THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

possess will be devoted to this Professorate; 
and that it will be henceforth the main object 
of my life to teach Modern History after a 
method which shall give satisfaction to the 
Eulers of this University. 

And I shall do that best, I believe, by 
keeping in mind the lessons which I, in com- 
mon with thousands more, have learnt from 
my wise and good predecessor. I do not 
mean merely patience in research, and accu- 
racy in fact. They are required of all men: 
and they may be learnt from many men. But 
what Sir James Stephen's life and writings 
should especially teach us, is the beauty and 
the value of charity; of that large-hearted 
humanity, which sympathizes with all noble, 
generous, earnest thought and endeavour, in 
whatsoever shape they may have appeared; 
a charity which, without weakly or lazily 
confounding the eternal laws of right and 
wrong, can make allowances for human frailty; 
can separate the good from the evil in men 



AS APPLIED TO HISTOET. S 

and in theories; can understand, and can 
forgive, because it loves. Who can read his 
works without feeling more kindly toward 
many a man, and many a form of thought, 
against which he has been more or less preju- 
diced; without a more genial view of human 
nature, a more hopeful view of human des- 
tiny, a more full belief in the great saying, 
that '' Wisdom is justified of all her children"? 
Who, too, can read those works without seeing 
how charity enlightens the intellect, just as 
bigotry darkens it; how events, which to 
the theorist and the pedant are merely mon- 
strous and unmeaning, may explain them- 
selves easily enough to the man who will 
put himself in his fellow-creatures' place; who 
will give them credit for being men of hke 
passions with himself; who will see with their 
eyes, feel with their hearts, and take for his 
motto, "Homo sum, nil humani a me ahe- 
num puto"? 

I entreat gentlemen who may hereafter 

1—2 



4 THE LIMITS OP EXACT SCIENCE 

attend my lectures to bear in mind this last 
saying. If they wish to understand History, 
they must first try to understand men and 
women. For History is the history of men 
and women, and of nothing else; and he 
who knows men and women thoroughly will 
best understand the past work of the world, 
and be best able to carry on its work now. The 
men who, in the long run, have governed the 
world, have been those who understood the 
human heart; and therefore it is to this day 
the statesman who keeps the reins in his 
hand, and not the mere student. He is a 
man of the world; he knows how to manage 
his fellow-men : and therefore he can get work 
done which the mere student (it may be) has 
taught him ought to be done; but which the 
mere student, much less the mere trader 
or economist, could not get done ; simply be- 
cause his fellow-men would probably not listen 
to him, and certainly outwit him. Of course, 
in proportion to the depth, width, soundness. 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 5 

of his conception of human nature, will be 
the greatness and wholesomeness of his power. 
He may appeal to the meanest, or to the lof- 
tiest motives. He may be a fox or an eagle; 
a Borgia, or a Hildebrand ; a Talleyrand, or a 
Napoleon; a Mary Stuart, or an Elizabeth: 
but however base, however noble, the power 
which he exercises is the same in essence. 
He makes History, because he understands 
men. And you, if you would understand 
History, must understand men. 

If, therefore, any of you should ask me 
how to study history, I should answer — 
Take by all means biographies : wheresoever 
possible, autobiographies ; and study them. 
Fill your minds with live human figures ; 
men of like passions with yourselves ; see 
how each lived and worked in the time and 
place in which God put him. Believe me, 
that when you have thus made a friend of 
the dead, and brought him to life again, and 
let him teach you to see with his eyes, and 



6 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

feel with his heart, you will begin to under- 
stand more of his generation and his circum- 
stances, than all the mere history-books of 
the period would teach you. In proportion 
as you understand the man, and only so, will 
you begin to understand the elements in 
which he worked. And not only to under- 
stand, but to remember. Names, dates, genea- 
logies, geographical details, costumes, fashions, 
manners, crabbed scraps of old law, which 
you used, perhaps, to read up and forget again, 
because they were not rooted, but stuck into 
your brain, as pins are into a pincushion, to 
fall out at the first shake — all these you will 
remember ; because they will arrange and 
organize themselves around the central hu- 
man figure : just as, if you have studied 
a portrait by some great artist, you cannot 
think of the face in it, without recollecting 
also the light and shadow, the tone of 
colouring, the dress, the very details of the 
background, and all the accessories which 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 7 

the painter's art has grouped around; each 
with a purpose, and therefore each fixing it- 
self duly in your mind. Who, for instance, 
has not found that he can learn more French 
history from French memoirs, than even from 
all the truly learned and admirable histories 
of France which have been written of late 
years ? There are those, too, who will say of 
good old Plutarch's lives, (now-a-days, I think, 
too much neglected,) what some great man 
used to say of Shakspeare and English his- 
tory — that all the ancient history which they 
really knew, they had got from Plutarch. 
And I am free to confess that I have learnt 
what httle I know of the middle-ages, what 
they were like, how they came to be what 
they were, and how they issued in the Re- 
formation, not so much from the study of the 
books about them (many and wise though 
they are), as from the thumbing over, for 
years, the semi-mythical saints' lives of Su- 
rius and the Bollandists. 



8 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

Without doubt History obeys, and always 
has obeyed, in the long run, certain laws. 
But those laws assert themselves, and are 
to be discovered, not in things, but in per- 
sons; in the actions of human beings; and 
just in proportion as we understand human 
beings, shall we understand the laws which 
they have obeyed, or which have avenged 
themselves on their disobedience. This may 
seem a truism : if it be such, it is one 
which we cannot too often repeat to our- 
selves just now, when the rapid progress of 
science is tempting us to look at human 
beings rather as things than as persons, and 
at abstractions (under the name of laws) 
rather as persons than as things. Discovering, 
to our just delight, order and law all around 
us, in a thousand events which seemed to our 
fathers fortuitous and arbitrary, we are daz- 
zled just now by the magnificent prospect 
opening before us, and fall, too often, into 
more than one serious mistake. 



AS APPLIED TO HISTOEY. 9 

First ; students try to explain too often all 
the facts which they meet by the very few 
laws which they know ; and especially moral 
phsenomena by physical, or at least economic 
laws. There is an excuse for this last error. 
Much which was thought, a few centuries 
since, to belong to the spiritual world, is now 
found to belong to the material; and the 
physician is consulted, where the exorcist used 
to be called in. But it is a somewhat hasty 
corollary therefrom, and one not likely to find 
favour in this University, that moral laws 
and spiritual agencies have nothing at all to 
do with the history of the human race. We 
shall not be inclined here, I trust, to explain 
(as some one tried to do lately) the Crusades 
by a hypothesis of overstocked labour-markets 
on the Continent. 

Neither, again, shall we be inclined to 
class those same Crusades among '^ popular 
delusions," and mere outbursts of folly and 
madness. This is a very easy, and I am sorry 



10 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

to say, a very common method of disposing 
of facts which will not fit into the theory, too 
common of late, that need and greed have 
been always, and always ought to be, the 
chief motives of mankind. Need and greed, 
heaven knows, are powerful enough: but I 
think that he who has something nobler in 
himself than need and greed, will have eyes 
to discern something nobler than them, in 
the most fantastic superstitions, in the most 
ferocious outbursts, of the most untutored 
masses. Thank God, that those who preach 
the opposite doctrine belie it so often by a 
happy inconsistency ; that he who declares 
self-interest to be the mainspring of the world, 
can live a life of virtuous self-sacrifice; that 
he who denies, with Spinoza, the existence of 
free-will, can disprove his own theory, by wil- 
ling, like Spinoza, amid all the temptations of 
the world, to live a life worthy of a Roman 
Stoic ; and that he who represents men as the 
puppets of material circumstance, and who 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 11 

therefore has no logical right either to praise 
virtue, or to blame vice, can shew, by a healthy 
admiration of the former, a healthy scorn of 
the latter, how little his heart has been cor- 
rupted by the eidola speciis, the phantoms of 
the study, which have oppressed his brain. 
But though men are often, thank heaven, 
better than their doctrines, yet the goodness 
of the man does not make his doctrine good ; 
and it is immoral as well as unphilosophical 
to call a thing hard names simply because 
Jfc cannot be fitted into our theory of the 
universe. Immoral, because all harsh and 
hasty wholesale judgments are immoral; un- 
philosophical, because the only philosophical 
method of looking at the strangest of phae- 
nomena is to believe that it too is the re- 
sult of law, perhaps a healthy result; that 
it is not to be condemned as a product of 
disease before it is proven to be such; and 
that if it be a product of disease, disease 
has its laws, as much as health: and is a 



12 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

subject, not for cursing, but for induction ; 
so tbat (to return to my example) if every 
man who ever took part in the Crusades 
were proved to have been simply mad, our 
sole business would be to discover why he 
went mad upon that special matter, and at 
that special time. And to do that, we must 
begin by recollecting that in every man who 
went forth to the Crusades, or to any other 
strange adventure of humanity, was a whole 
human heart and brain, of like strength and 
weakness, like hopes, like temptations, with 
our own; and find out what may have driven 
him mad, by considering what would have 
driven us mad in his place. 

May I be permitted to enlarge somewhat 
on this topic? There is, as you are aware, 
a demand just now for philosophies of History. 
The general spread of Inductive Science has 
awakened this appetite; the admirable con- 
temporary French historians have quickened 
it by feeding it ; till, the more order and 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 13 

sequence we find in the facts of the past, the 
more we wish to find. So it should be (or 
why wa» man created a rational being?) and 
so it is; and the requirements of the more 
educated are becoming so peremptory, that 
many thinking men would be ready to say 
(I should be sorry to endorse their opinion), 
that if History is not studied according to 
exact scientific method, it need not be studied 
at all. 

A very able anonymous writer has lately 
expressed this general tendency of modern 
thought in language so clear and forcible 
that I must beg leave to quote it: — 

'^Step by step," he says, '^the notion of 
evolution by law is transforming the whole 
field of our knowledge and opinion. It is 
not one order of conception which comes 
under its influence : but it is the whole sphere 
of our ideas, and with them the whole system 
of our action and conduct. Not the physical 
world alone is now the domain of inductive 



14 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

science, but the moral, the intellectual, and 
the spiritual are being added to its empire. 
Two co-ordinate ideas pervade the vision of 
every thinker, physicist or moralist, philo- 
sopher or priest. In the physical and the 
moral world, in the natural and the human, 
are ever seen two forces — invariable rule, and 
continual advance ; law and action ; order and 
progress; these two powers working harmo- 
niously together, and the result, inevitable se- 
quence, orderly movement, irresistible growth. 
In the physical world indeed, order is most 
prominent to our eyes; in the moral world it is 
progress, but both exist as truly in the one as 
in the other. In the scale of nature, as we rise 
from the inorganic to the organic, the idea of 
change becomes even more distinct; just as 
when we rise through the gradations of the 
moral world, the idea of order becomes more 
difficult to grasp. It was the last task of the 
astronomer to show eternal change even in the 
grand order of our Solar System. It is the 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 15 

crown of philosophy to see immutable law 
even in the complex action of human life. In 
the latter, indeed, it is but the first germs 
which are clear. No rational thinker hopes 
to discover more than some few primary- 
actions of law, and some approximative theory 
of growth. Much is dark and contradictory. 
Numerous theories differing in method and 
degree are offered; nor do we decide between 
them. We insist now only upon this, that 
the principle of development in the moral, as 
in the physical, has been definitively admitted ; 
and something like a conception of one grand 
analogy through the whole sphere of know- 
ledge, has almost become a part of popular 
opinion. Most men shrink from any broad 
statement of the principle, though all in some 
special instances adopt it. It surrounds every 
idea of our life, and is diffused in every branch 
of study. The press, the platform, the lecture- 
room, and the pulpit ring with it in every 
variety of form. Unconscious pedants are 



16 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

proving it. It flashes on tlie statistician 
tlirougli his registers ; it guides the hand of 
simple philanthropy; it is obeyed by the in- 
stinct of the statesman. There is not an act 
of our public life which does not acknowledge 
it. No man denies that there are certain, and 
even practical laws of political economy. They 
are nothing but laws of society. The con- 
ferences of social reformers, the congresses for 
international statistics and for social science 
bear witness of its force. Everywhere we 
hear of the development of the constitution, 
of public law, of public opinion, of institutions, 
of forms of society, of theories of history. In 
a word, whatever views of history may be in- 
culcated on the Universities by novelists or 
epigrammatists, it is certain that the best intel- 
lects and spirits of our day are labouring to 
see more of that invariable order, and of that 
principle of growth in the life of human 
societies and of the great society of mankind 
which nearly all men, more or less, acknow- 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 17 

ledge, and partially and unconsciously con- 
firm." 

This passage expresses admirably, I think, 
the tendencies of modern thought for good 
and evil. 

For good. For surely it is good, and a 
thing to thank God for, that men should be 
more and more expecting order, searching for 
order, welcoming order. But for evil also. 
For young sciences, like young men, have 
their time of wonder, hope, imagination, 
and of passion too, and haste, and bigotry. 
Dazzled, and that pardonably, by the beauty of 
the few laws they may have discovered, they 
are too apt to erect them into gods, and to ex- 
plain by them all matters in heaven and earth ; 
and apt, too, as I think this author does, to 
patch them where they are weakest, by that 
most dangerous succedaneum of vague and 
grand epithets, which very often contain, each 
of them, an assumption far more important 
than the law to which they are tacked. 

2 



18 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

Such surely are the words which so often 
occur in this passage — " Invariable, continual, 
immutable, inevitable, irresistible." There is 
an ambiguity in these words, which may lead — 
which I believe does lead— to most unphiloso- 
phical conclusions. They are used very much 
as synonyms ; not merely in this passage, but 
in the mouths of men. Are you aware that 
those who carelessly do so, blink the whole of 
the world-old argument between necessity and 
free-will? Whatever may be the rights of that 
quarrel, they are certainly not to be assumed 
in a passing epithet. But what else does the 
writer do, who tells us that an inevitable 
sequence, an irresistible growth, exists in the 
moral as well as in the physical world ; and then 
says, as a seemingly identical statement, that it 
is the crown of philosophy to see immutable 
law, even in the complex action of human life ? 

The crown of philosophy? Doubtless it 
is so. But not a crown, I should have thought, 
which has been reserved as the special glory 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY, 19 

of these latter days. Very early, at least in 
the known history of mankind, did Philoso- 
phy (under the humble names of Beligion 
and Common Sense) see most immutable, 
and even eternal, laws, in the complex action 
of human life, even the laws of right and 
wrong; and called them The Everlasting Judg- 
ments of God, to which a confused and hard- 
worked man was to look; and take comfort, 
for all would be well at last. By fair induc- 
tion (as I believe) did man discover, more or 
less clearly, those eternal laws : by repeated 
verifications of them in every age, man has 
been rising, and will yet rise, to clearer in- 
sight into their essence, their limits, their 
practical results. And if it be these, the old 
laws of right and wrong, which this author 
and his school call invariable and immutable, 
we shall, I trust, most heartily agree with 
them; only wondering why a moral govern- 
ment of the world seems to them so very 
recent a discovery. 

2—2 



20 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

But we shall not agree with them, I trust, 
when they represent these invariable and im- 
mutable laws as resulting in any inevitable 
sequence, or irresistible growth. "We shall not 
deny a sequence — Reason forbids that ; or 
again, a growth — Experience forbids that : but 
we shall be puzzled to see why a law, because 
it is immutable itself, should produce inevita- 
ble results ; and if they quote the facts of 
material nature against us, we shall be ready 
to meet them on that very ground, and ask : 
— ^You say that as the laws of matter are 
inevitable, so probably are the laws of human 
life ? Be it so : but in what sense are the laws 
of matter inevitable? Potentially, or actually? 
Even in the seemingly most uniform and 
universal law, where do we find the inevita- 
ble or the irresistible ? Is there not in nature 
a perpetual competition of law against law, 
force against force, producing the most end- 
less and unexpected variety of results? Can- 
not each law be interfered with at any 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 21 

moment by some other law, so that the first 
law, though it may struggle for the mastery, 
shall be for an indefinite time utterly de- 
feated? The law of gravity is immutable 
enough : but do all stones inevitably fall to 
the ground ? Certainly not, if I choose to catch 
one, and keep it in my hand. It remains there 
by laws ; and the law of gravity is there too, 
making it feel heavy in my hand : but it has 
not fallen to the ground, and will not, till I 
let it. So much for the inevitable action of 
the laws of gravity, as of others. Potentially, 
it is immutable ; but actually, it can be con- 
quered by other laws. 

I really beg your pardon for occupying 
you here with such truisms : but I must put 
the students of this University in mind of 
them, as long as too many modern thinkers 
shall choose to ignore them. 

Even if then, as it seems to me, the 
history of mankind depended merely on phy- 
sical laws, analogous to those which govern 



22 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

the rest of nature, it would be a hopeless 
task for us to discover an inevitable sequence 
in History, even tbougb we might suppose 
that such existed. But as long as man has 
the mysterious power of breaking the laws 
of his own being, such a sequence not only 
cannot be discovered, but it cannot exist. 
For man can break the lawB of his own being, 
whether physical, intellectual, or moral. He 
breaks them every day, and has always been 
breaking them. The greater number of them he 
cannot obey till he knows them. And too many 
of them he cannot know, alas, till he has broken 
them ; and paid the penalty of his ignorance. 
He does not, like the brute or the vegetable, 
thrive by laws of which he is not conscious : 
but by laws of which he becomes gradually 
conscious; and which he can disobey after all. 
And therefore it seems to me very like a 
juggle of words to draw analogies from the 
physical and irrational world, and apply them 
to the moral and rational world ; and most 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 23 

unwise to bridge over the gulf between the 
two by such adjectives as '^ irresistible " or 
'^ inevitable," such nouns as " order, sequence, 
law" — which must bear an utterly different 
meaning, acisording as they are applied to 
physical beings or to moral ones. 

Indeed, so patent is the ambiguity, that 
I cannot fancy that it has escaped the 
author and his school; and am driven, by 
mere respect for their logical powers, to sup- 
pose that they mean no ambiguity at all ; that 
they do not conceive of irrational beings as 
differing from rational beings, or the physical 
from the moral, or the body of man from his 
spirit, in kind and property; and that the im- 
mutable laws which they represent as govern- 
ing human life and history have nothing at 
all to do with those laws of right and wrong, 
which I intend to set forth to you, as the 
" everlasting judgments of God." 

In which case, I fear, they must go their 
way, and we ours, confessing that there is 



24 THE LIMITS OP EXACT SCIENCE 

an order, and there is a law, for man; and 
that if he disturb that order, or break that 
law in anywise, they will prove themselves 
too strong for him, and reassert themselves, 
and go forward, grinding him to powder, if 
he stubbornly try to stop their way. But 
asserting too, that his disobedience to them, 
even for a moment, has disturbed the natural 
course of events, and broken that inevitable 
sequence, which we may find indeed, in our 
own imaginations, as long as we sit with 
a book in our studies : but which vanishes 
the moment that we step outside into prac- 
tical contact with life ; and, instead of talking 
cheerfully of a necessary and orderly progress, 
find ourselves more inclined to cry with the 
cynical man of the world: 

" All the windy ways of men, 
Are but dust that rises up; 
And is lightly laid again." 

The usual rejoinder to this argument is 
to fall back upon man's weakness and igno- 



AS APPLIED TO HISTOKY. 25 

ranee, and to take refuge in the infinite 
unknown. Man, it is said, may of course 
interfere a little with some of the less im- 
portant laws of his being : but who is he, 
to grapple with the more vast and remote 
ones ? Because he can prevent a pebble from 
falling, is he to suppose that he can alter 
the destiny of nations, and grapple forsooth 
with 'Hhe eternities and the immensities," 
and so forth ? The argument is very power- 
ful: but addrest rather to the imagination 
than the reason. It is, after all, another form 
of the old omne ignotum pro magnifico ; and 
we may answer, I think fairly — About the 
eternities and immensities we know nothing, 
not having been there as yet; but it is a 
mere assumption to suppose, without proof, 
that the more remote and impalpable laws are 
more vast, in the sense of being more power- 
ful (the only sense which really bears upon 
the argument), than the laws which are pal- 
pably at work around us all day long; and 



26 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

if we are capable of interfering with almost 
every law of human life which we know of 
already, it is more philosophical to believe 
(till disproved by actual failure) that we can 
interfere with those laws of our life which 
we may know hereafter. Whether it will 
pay us to interfere with them, is a differ- 
ent question. It is not prudent to interfere 
with the laws of health, and it may not be 
with other laws, hereafter to be discovered. 
I am only pleading that man can disobey 
the laws of his being; that such power 
has always been a disturbing force in the 
progress of the human race, which modern 
theories too hastily overlook; and that the 
science of history (unless the existence of the 
human will be denied) must belong rather to 
the moral sciences, than to that "positive 
science" which seems to me inclined to reduce 
all human phsenomena under physical laws, 
hastily assumed, by the old fallacy of /xera- 
(3dais: ek aWo yevos, to apply where there is no 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 27 

proof whatsoever that they do or even can 
apply. 

As for the question of the existence of 
the human will — I am not here, I hope, to 
argue that. I shall only beg leave to assume 
its existence, for practical purposes. I may 
be told (though I trust not in this Univer- 
sity), that it is, like the undulatory theory of 
light, an unphilosophical *' hypothesis." Be 
that as it may, it is very convenient (and 
may be for a few centuries to come) to retain 
the said " hypothesis," as one retains the un- 
dulatory theory; and for the simple reason, 
that with it one can explain the pheenomena 
tolerably ; and without it cannot explain 
them at all. 

A dread (half-unconscious, it may be) of 
this last practical result, seems to have 
crossed the mind of the author on whom I 
have been commenting; for he confesses, hon- 
estly enough (and he writes throughout like 
an honest man) that in human life ^' no rational 



28 THE LIMITS OP EXACT SCIENCE 

thinker hopes to discover more than some 
few primary actions of law, and some approx- 
imative theory of growth." I have higher 
hopes of a possible science of history ; because 
I fall back on those old moral laws, which I 
think he wishes to ignore : but I can conceive 
that he will not; because he cannot, on his 
own definitions of law and growth. They are 
(if I understand him aright) to be irresistible 
and inevitable. I say that they are not so, 
even in the case of trees and stones; much 
more in the world of man. Facts, when he 
goes on to verify his theories, will leave him 
with a very few primary actions of law, a very 
faint approximative theory ; because his theo- 
ries, in plain English, will not work. At the 
first step, at every step, they are stopped 
short by those disturbing forces, or at least 
disturbed phsenomena, which have been as 
yet, and probably will be hereafter, attributed 
(as the only explanation of them) to the 
existence, for good and evil, of a human will. 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 29 

Let US look in detail at a few of these 
disturbances of anything like inevitable or 
irresistible movement. Shall we not, at the 
very first glance, confess — I am afraid only 
too soon — that there always have been fools 
therein; fools of whom no man could guess, 
or can yet, what they were going to do next 
or why they were going to do it ? And how, 
pray, can we talk of the inevitable, in the 
face of that one miserable fact of human folly, 
whether of ignorance or of passion, folly 
still? There may be laws of folly, as there 
are laws of disease; and whether there are 
or not, we may learn much wisdom from 
folly; we may see what the true laws of 
humanity are, by seeing the penalties which 
come from breaking them: but as for laws 
which work of themselves, by an irresis- 
tible movement, — how can we discover such 
in a past in which every law which we know 
has been outraged again and again? Take 
one of the highest instances — the progress 



30 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

of the human intellect — I do not mean just 
now the spread of conscious science, but 
of that unconscious science which we call 
common sense. What hope have we of lay- 
ing down exact laws for its growth, in a 
world wherein it has been ignored, insulted, 
crushed, a thousand times, sometimes in whole 
nations and for whole generations, by the 
stupidity, tyranny, greed, caprice of a single 
ruler; or if not so, yet by the mere supersti- 
tion, laziness, sensuality, anarchy of the mob ? 
How, again, are we to arrive at any exact 
laws of the increase of population, in a race 
which has had, from the beginning, the ab- 
normal and truly monstrous habit of slaugh- 
tering each other, not for food — for in a race 
of normal cannibals, the ratio of increase or 
decrease might easily be calculated — but use- 
lessly, from rage, hate, fanaticism, or even 
mere wantonness? No man is less inclined 
than I to undervalue vital statistics, and their 
already admirable results: but how can they 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 31 

help US, and how can we help them, in looking 
at such a past as that of three-fourths of the 
nations of the world? Look — as a single in- 
stance among too many— at that most noble 
nation of Germany, swept and stunned, by 
peasant wars, thirty years' wars, French 
wars, and after each hurricane, blossoming 
up again into brave industry and brave 
thought, to be in its turn cut off by a fresh 
storm ere it could bear full fruit : doing never- 
theless such work, against such fearful dis- 
advantages, as nation never did before; and 
proving thereby what she might have done 
for humanity, had not she, the mother of all 
European life, been devoured, generation after 
generation, by her own unnatural children. 
Nevertheless, she is their mother still; and 
her history, as I believe, the root- history of 
Europe : but it is hard to read — the sibylline 
leaves are so fantastically torn, the characters 
so blotted out by tears and blood. 

And if such be the history of not one 



32 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

nation only, but of the average, how, I 
ask, are we to make calculations about such 
a species as man? Many modern men of 
science wish to draw the normal laws of 
human life from the average of humanity: 
I question whether they can do so; because 
I do not believe the average man to be the 
normal man, exhibiting the normal laws : but 
a very abnormal man, diseased and crippled, 
but even if their method were correct, it 
could work in practice, only if the destinies 
of men were always decided by majorities: 
and granting that the majority of men have 
common sense, are the minority of fools to 
count for nothing? Are they powerless? 
Have they had no influence on History? 
Have they even been always a minority, 
and not at times a terrible majority, doing 
each that which was right in the sight of 
his own eyes? You can surely answer that 
question for yourselves. As far as my small 
knowledge of History goes, I think it may be 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 33 

proved from facts, tliat any given people, down 
to the lowest savages, has, at any period of 
its life, known far more than it has done; 
known quite enough to have enabled it to 
have got on comfortably, thriven, and develop- 
ed ; if it had only done, what no man does, all 
that it knew it ought to do, and could do. St 
Paul's experience of himself is true of all 
mankind — " The good which I would, I do not ; 
and the evil which I would not, that I do." 
The discrepancy between the amount of know- 
ledge and the amount of work, is one of the 
most patent and most painful facts which 
strikes us in the history of man; and one not 
certainly to be explained on any theory of 
man's progress being the effect of inevitable 
laws, or one which gives us much hope of 
ascertaining fixed laws for that progress. 

And bear in mind, that fools are not 
always merely imbecile and obstructive; they 
are at times ferocious, dangerous, mad. There 
is in human nature what Gothe used to call 

3 



34 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

a demoniac element, defying all law, and 
all induction; and we can, I fear, from that 
one cause, as easily calculate the progress 
of the human race, as we can calculate that 
of the vines upon the slopes of ^tna, with 
the lava ready to boil up and overwhelm them 
at any and every moment. Let us learn, in 
God's name, all we can, from the short inter- 

i vals of average peace and common sense : let 
us, or rather our grandchildren, get precious 
lessons from them for the next period of sa- 

i nity. But let us not be surprised, much less 
disheartened, if after learning a very little, 

j some unexpected and truly demoniac factor, 
Anabaptist war, French revolution, or other, 

: should toss all our calculations to the winds, 
and set us to begin afresh, sadder and wiser 
men. We may learn, doubtless, even more 
of the real facts of human nature, the real 
laws of human history, from these critical 
periods, when the root-fibres of the human 
heart are laid bare, for good and evil, than 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 35 

from any smooth and respectable periods off 
peace and plenty: nevertheless their lessons 
are not statistical, but moral. 

But if human folly has been a disturbing 
force for evil, surely human reason has been 
a disturbing force for good. Man can not 
only disobey the laws of his being, he can 
also choose between them, to an extent which 
science widens every day, and so become, 
what he was meant to be, an artificial being ; 
artificial in his manufactures, habits, society, 
polity — what not ? All day long he has a free 
choice between even physical laws, which 
mere things have not, and which make the 
laws of mere things inapplicable to him. Take 
the simplest case. If he falls into the water, 
he has his choice whether he will obey the 
laws of gravity and sink, or by other 
laws perform the (to him) artificial process of 
swimming, and get ashore. True, both would 
happen by law: but he has his choice which 
law shall conquer, sink or swim. We have 

3—2 



36 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

yet to learn why whole nations, why all man- 
kind may not use the same prudential power 
as to which law they shall obey, — which, with- 
out breaking it, they shall conquer and re- 
press, as long as seems good to them. 

It is true, nature must be obeyed in order 
that she may be conquered: but then she is 
to be CONQUERED. It has been too much the 
fashion of late to travestie that great dictum 
of Bacon's into a very different one, and say, 
Nature must be obeyed because she cannot 
be conquered ; thus proclaiming the impotence 
of science to discover anything save her own 
impotence — a result as contrary to fact, as to 
Bacon's own hopes of what science would do for 
the welfare of the human race. For what is all 
human invention, but the transcending and con- 
quering one natural law by another? "What is 
the practical answer which all mankind has 
been making to nature and her pretensions, 
whenever it has progressed one step since 
the foundation of the world : by which all dis- 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 37 

coverers have discovered, all teachers tauofht : 
by which all polities^ kingdoms, civilizations, 
arts, manufactures, have established them- 
selves; all who have raised themselves above 
the mob have faced the mob, and con- 
quered the mob, crucified by them first and 
worshipped by them afterwards : by which 
the first savage conquered the natural law 
which put wild beasts in the forest, by killing 
them; conquered the natural law which makes 
raw meat wholesome, by cooking it ; con- 
quered the natural law which made weeds 
grow at his hut door, by rooting them up, 
and planting corn instead ; and won his 
first spurs in the great battle of man against 
nature,^ proving thereby that he was a man, 
and not an ape? What but this? — '^Na- 
ture is strong, but I am stronger. I know 
her worth, but I know my own. I trust her 
and her laws, but my trusty servant she shall 
be, and not my tyrant; and if she interfere 
with my ideal, even with my personal com- 



s/ 



38 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

fort, then Nature and I will fight it out to the 
last gasp, and Heaven defend the right !" 

In forgetting this, in my humble opinion, 
lay the error of the early, or laissez /aire 
School of Political Economy. It was too 
much inclined to say to men : " You are the 
puppets of certain natural laws. Your own 
free-will and choice, if they really exist, exist 
merely as a dangerous disease. All you can do 
is to submit to the laws, and drift whither- 
soever they may carry you, for good or evil." 
But not less certainly was the same blame to be 
attached to the French Socialist School. It, 
though based on a revolt from the Philoso- 
phic du neant, philosophic de la misere, as it 
used to term the laissez faire School, yet re- 
tained the worst fallacy of its foe, namely, that 
man was the creature of circumstances ; and 
denied him just as much as its antagonist the 
possession of freewill, or at least the right to 
use freewill on any large scale. 

The laissez faire School was certainly 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 39 

the more logical of the two. With them, if 
man was the creature of circumstances, those 
circumstances were at least defined for him by 
external laws which he had not created : while 
the Socialists, with Fourier at their head (as it 
has always seemed to me), fell into the extra- 
ordinary paradox of supposing that though 
man was the creature of circumstances, he 
was to become happy by creating the very cir- 
cumstances which were afterwards to create 
him. But both of them erred, surely, in ig- 
noring that self-arbitrating power of man, by 
which he can, for good or for evil, rebel against 
and conquer circumstance. 

I am not, surely, overstepping my pro- 
vince^ as Professor of History, in alluding to 
this subject. Just notions of Political Eco- 
nomy are absolutely necessary to just notions 
of History ; and I should wish those young 
gentlemen who may attend my Lectures, to go 
first, were it possible, to my more learned 
brother, the Professor of Political Economy, 



J 



40 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

and get from him not merely exact habits of 
thought, but a knowledge which I cannot give, 
and yet which they ought to possess. For to 
take the very lowest ground, the first fact 
of history is, Bouche va toujours; whatever 
men have or have not done, they have always 
eaten, or tried to eat; and the laws which 
regulate the supply of the first necessaries of 
life are, after all, the first which should be 
learnt, and the last which should be ignored. 

The more modern school, however, of Po- 
litical Economy while giving due weight to 
circumstance, has refused to acknowledge it 
as the force which ought to determine all 
human life ; and our greatest living political 
economist has, in his Essay on Liberty, put 
in a plea unequalled since the Areopagitica of 
Milton, for the self-determining power of the 
individual, and for his right to use that power. 

But my business is not with rights, so 
much as with facts ; and as a fact, surely, one 
may say, that this inventive reason of man 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 41 

has been, in all ages, interfering with any- 
thing like an inevitable sequence or orderly 
progress of humanity. Some of those writers, 
indeed, who are most anxious to discover 
an exact order, are most loud in their com- 
plaints that it has been interfered with by 
over-legislation ; and rejoice that mankind is 
returning to a healthier frame of mind, and 
leaving nature alone to her own work in her 
own way. I do not altogether agree with 
their complaints ; but of that I hope to speak 
in subsequent lectures. Meanwhile, I must 
ask, if (as is said) most good legislation now-a- 
days consists in repealing old laws w^hich ought 
never to have been passed ; if (as is said) the 
great fault of our forefathers was that they 
were continually setting things wrong, by 
intermeddling in matters political, economic, 
religious, which should have been let alone, 
to develop themselves in their own way, 
what becomes of the inevitable laws, and the 
continuous progress, of the human mind ? 



/ 



42 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

Look again at the disturbing power, not 
merely of the general reason of the many, but 
of the genius of the few. I am not sure, 
but that the one fact, that genius is occasion- 
ally present in the world, is not enough to 
prevent our ever discovering any regular 
sequence in human progress, past or future. 

Let me explain myself. In addition to 
the infinite variety of individual characters 
continually born (in itself a cause of perpetual 
disturbance), man alone of all species has the 
faculty of producing, from time to time, in- 
dividuals immeasurably superior to the aver- 
age in some point or other, whom we call men 
of genius. Like Mr Babbage's calculating 
machine, human nature gives millions of order- 
ly respectable common-place results, which any 
statistician can classify, and enables hasty phi- 
losophers to say— It always has gone on thus ; 
it must go on thus always ; when behold, 
after many millions of orderly results, there 
turns up a seemingly disorderly, a certainly 



AS APPLIED TO HISTOET. 43 

unexpected, result, and the law seems broken 
(being really superseded by some deeper law) 
for that once, and perhaps never again for 
centuries. Even so it is with man, and the 
physiological laws which determine the earthly 
appearance of men. Laws there are, doubt 
it not ; but they are beyond us : and let our 
induction be as wide as it may, they will 
baffle it ; and great nature, just as we fancy 
we have found out her secret, will smile in 
our faces as she brings into the world a man, 
the like of whom we have never seen, and 
cannot explain, define, classify — in one word, 
a genius. Such do, as a fact, become leaders 
of men into quite new and unexpected paths, 
and for good or evil, leave their stamp upon 
whole generations and races. Notorious as 
this may be, it is just, I think, what most mo- 
dern theories of human progress ignore. They 
take the actions and the tendencies of the 
average many, and from them construct their 
scheme : a method not perhaps quite safe 



44 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

were tliey dealing with plants or animals ; but 
what if it be the very peculiarity of this 
fantastic and altogether unique creature called 
man, not only that he develops, from time to 
time, these exceptional individuals, but that 
they are the most important individuals of 
all ? that his course is decided for him not 
by the average many, but by the extraor- 
dinary few ; that one Mahommed, one Luther, 
one Bacon, one Napoleon, shall change the 
thoughts and habits of millions ? — So that in- 
stead of saying that the history of mankind 
is the history of its masses, it would be much 
more true to say, that the history of mankind 
is the history of its great men ; and that a 
true philosophy of history ought to declare the 
laws — call them physical, spiritual, biological, 
or what we choose — by which great minds 
have been produced into the world, as ne- 
cessary results, each in his place and time. 

That would be a science indeed; how far 
we are as yet from any such, you know as 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 45 

well as I. As yet, the appearance of great 
minds is as inexplicable to us as if they had 
dropped among us from another planet. Who 
will tell us why they have arisen when 
they did, and why they did what they did, 
and nothing else? I do not deny that such 
a science is conceivable ; because each mind, 
however great or strange, may be the result 
of fixed and unerring laws of life: and it is 
conceivable, too, that such a science may so 
perfectly explain the past, as to be able to 
predict the future ; and tell men when a fresh 
genius is likely to arise an of what form 
his intellect will be. Conceivable : but I fear 
only conceivable; if for no other reason, at 
least for this one. We may grant safely that 
the mind of Luther was the necessary result 
of a combination of natural laws. We may 
go further, and grant, but by no means safely, 
that Luther was the creature of circumstances, 
that there was no self-moving originality in 
him, but that his age made him what he was. 



46 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

To some modern minds tliese concessions re- 
move all difficulty and mystery: but not, I 
trust, to our minds. For does not the very 
puzzle de quo agitur remain equally real ; 
namely, why the average of Augustine monks, 
the average of German men, did not, by 
being exposed to the same average circum- 
stances as Luther, become what Luther 
was ? But whether we allow Luther to have 
been a person with an originally different 
character from all others, or whether we hold 
him to have been the mere puppet of outside 
influences, the first step towards discovering 
how he became what he was, will be to find 
out what he was. It will be more easy, and, 
I am sorry to say, more common to settle 
beforehand our theory, and explain by it 
such parts of Luther as will fit it; and call 
those which will not fit it hard names. 
History is often so taught, and the method 
is popular and lucrative. But we here shall 
be of opinion, I am sure, that we can only 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 47 

learn causes through, their effects ; we can only 
learn the laws which produced Luther, by 
learning Luther himself; by analyzing his 
whole character ; by gauging all his powers ; 
and that — unless the less can comprehend 
the greater — we cannot do till we are more 
than Luther himself. I repeat it. None can 
comprehend a man, unless he be greater than 
that man. He must be not merely equal 
to him, because none can see in another 
elements of character which he has not al- 
ready seen in himself: he must be greater; 
because to comprehend him thoroughly, he 
must be able to judge the man's failings as 
well as his excellencies; to see not only why 
he did what he did, but why he did not do 
more : in a word, he must be nearer than his 
object is to the ideal man. 

And if it be assumed that I am quibbling 
on the words '^comprehend" and '^ greater," 
that the observer need be greater only poten- 
tially, and not in act; that all the compre- 



48 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

liension required of him, is to have in himself 
the germs of other men's faculties, without 
having developed those germs in life ; I must 
still stand to my assertion. For such a re- 
joinder ignores the most mysterious element 
of all character, which we call strength: by 
virtue of which, of two seemingly similar 
characters, while one does nothing, the other 
shall do great things; while in one the germs 
of intellect and virtue remain comparatively 
embryotic, passive, and weak, in the other 
these same germs shall develop into manhood, 
action, success. And in what that same 
strength consists, not even the dramatic 
imagination of a Shakspeare could discover. 
What are those heart-rending sonnets of his, 
but the confession that over and above all 
his powers he lacked one thing, and knew 
not what it was, or where to find it — and 
that was — to be strong? 

And yet he who will give us a science 
of great men, must begin by having a larger 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 49 

heart, a keener insiglit, a more varying hu- 
man experience, than Shakespeare's own; 
while those who offer us a science of Httle 
men, and attempt to explain history and 
progress by laws drawn from the average of 
mankind, are utterly at sea the moment 
they come in contact with the very men 
whose actions make the history, to whose 
thought the progress is due. And why? 
Because (so at least I think) the new science 
of little men can be no science at all : because 
the average man is not the normal man, and 
never yet has been ; because the great man 
is rather the normal man, as approaching 
more nearly than his fellows to the true 
''norma" and standard of a complete human 
character ; and therefore to pass him by as a 
mere irregular sport of nature, an accidental 
giant with six fingers and six toes, and to turn 
to the mob for your theory of humanity, is (I 
think) about as wise as to ignore the Apollo 
and the Theseus, and to determine the pro- 

4 



50 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

portions of the human figure from a crowd of 
dwarfs and cripples. 

No, let us not weary ourselves with narrow 
theories, with hasty inductions, which will, a 
century hence, furnish mere matter for a 
smile. Let us confine ourselves, at least in the 
present infantile state of the anthropologic 
sciences, to facts; to ascertaining honestly and 
patiently the thing which has been done; 
trusting that if we make ourselves masters of 
them, some rays of inductive light will be 
vouchsafed to us from Him who truly com- 
prehends mankind, and knows what is in 
man, because He is the Son of Man; who 
has His own true theory of human progress, 
His own sound method of educating the 
human race, perfectly good, and perfectly wise, 
and at last, perfectly victorious ; which never- 
theless, were it revealed to us to-morrow, we 
could not understand; for if he who would com- 
prehend Luther must be more than Luther, 
what must he be, who would comprehend God ? 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 51 

Look again, as a result of the disturbing 
force. of genius, at the effects of great inven- 
tions — how unexpected, complex, subtle, all 
but miraculous— throwing out alike the path 
of human history, and the calculations of the 
student. If physical discoveries produced 
only physical or economic results — if the in- 
vention of printing had only produced more 
books, and more knowledge — if the invention 
of gunpowder had only caused more or less 
men to be killed — if the invention of the spin- 
ning-jenny had only produced more cotton- 
stuffs, more employment, and therefore more 
human beings, — then their effects would have 
been, however complex, more or less subjects 
of exact computation. 

But so strangely interwoven is the physi- 
cal and spiritual history of man, that material 
inventions produce continually the most un- 
expected spiritual results. Printing becomes 
a religious agent, causes not merely more 
books, but a Protestant Eeformation; then 

4—2 



52 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

/ again, through the Jesuit literature, helps to 
a Romanist counter-reformation; and by the 
clashing of the two, is one of the great causes 
of the Thirty years war, one of the most dis- 
astrous checks which European progress ever 
suffered. Gunpowder, again, not content with 
killing men, becomes unexpectedly a political 
agent; ^Hhe villanous saltpetre," as Ariosto 
and Shakspeare's fop complain, *^does to death 
many a goodly gentleman," and enables the 
masses to cope, for the first time, with knights 
in armour; thus forming a most important 
agent in the rise of the middle classes ; while 
the spinning-jenny, not content with furnish- 
ing facts for the political economist, and em- 
ployment for millions, helps to extend slavery 
in the United States, and gives rise to moral 
and political questions, which may have, ere 
they be solved, the most painful conse- 
quences to one of the greatest nations on 
earth. 

So far removed is the sequence of human 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 53 

history from any thing which we can call irre- 
sistible or inevitable. Did one dare to deal 
in epithets, crooked, wayward, mysterious, in- 
calculable, would be those which would rather 
suggest themselves to a man looking steadily 
not at a few facts here and there, and not 
again at some hasty bird's-eye sketch, which 
he chooses to call a whole : but at the actual 
whole, fact by fact, step by step, and alas! 
failure by failure, and crime by crime. 

Understand me, I beg. I do not wish 
(Heaven forbid!) to discourage inductive 
thought; I do not wish to undervalue exact 
science. I only ask that the moral world, 
which is just as much the domain of induc- 
tive science as the physical one, be not 
ignored; that the tremendous difficulties of 
analyzing its phenomena be fairly faced ; and 
the hope given up, at least for the present, of 
forming any exact science of history; and I 
wish to warn you off from the too common 
mistake of trying to explain the mysteries of 



54 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

the spiritual world by a few roughly defined 
physical laws (for too much of our modern 
thought does little more than that); and of 
ignoring as old fashioned, or even super- 
stitious, those great moral laws of history, 
which are sanctioned by the experience of ages. 
Foremost among them stands a law which 
I must insist on, boldly and perpetually, if I 
wish (as I do wish) tp follow in the footsteps 
of Sir James Stephen : a law which man has 
been trying in all ages, as now, to deny, or 
at least to ignore; though he might have 
seen it if he had willed, working steadily in all 
times and nations. And that is — that as the 
fruit of righteousness is wealth and peace, 
strength and honour; the fruit of unrighteous- 
ness is poverty and anarchy, weakness and 
shame, It is an ancient doctrine, and yet 
one ever young. The Hebrew prophets 
preached it long ago, in w^ords which are 
fulfilling themselves around us every day, 
and whiph no new discoveries of science will 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 55 

abrogate, because they express tbe great 
root-law, which disobeyed, science itself can- 
not get a hearing. 

For not upon mind, gentlemen, not upon 
mind, but upon morals, is human welfare 
founded. The true subjective history of man 
is the history not of his thought, but of his 
conscience; the true objective history of man 
is not that of his inventions, but of his vices 
and his virtues. So far from morals depend- 
ing upon thought, thought, I believe, depends 
on morals. In proportion as a nation is 
righteous, — in proportion as common justice 
is done between man and man, will thought 
grow rapidly, securely, triumphantly; will its 
discoveries be cheerfully accepted, and faith- 
fully obeyed, to the welfare of the whole 
commonweal. But where a nation is corrupt, 
that is, where the majority of individuals in 
it are bad, and justice is not done between 
man and man, there thought will wither, and 
science will be either crushed by frivolity and 



56 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

sensuality, or abused to the ends of tyranny, 
ambition, profligacy, till she herself perishes, 
amid the general ruin of all good things; as 
she has done in Greece, 'in Borne, in Spain, 
in China, and many other lands. Laws of 
economy, of polity, of health, of all which 
makes human life endurable, may be ignored 
and trampled under foot, and are too often, 
every day, for the sake of present greed, of 
present passion; self-interest may become, and 
will become, more and more blinded, just 
in proportion as it is not enlightened by 
virtue; till a nation may arrive, though, 
thank God, but seldom, at that state of frantic 
recklessness which Salvian describes among 
his Boman countrymen in Gaul, when, while 
the Franks were thundering at their gates, 
and starved and half-burnt corpses lay about 
the unguarded streets, the remnant, like that 
in doomed Jerusalem of old, were drinking, 
dicing, ravishing, robbing the orphan and the 
widow, swindling the poor man out of his 



AS APPLIED TO HISTOEY. 57 

plot of ground, and sending meanwhile to 
the tottering Csesar at Eome, to ask, not for 
armies, but for Circensian games. 

We cannot see how science could have 
bettered those poor Gauls. And we can con- 
ceive, surely, a nation falling into the same 
madness, and crying, " Let us eat and drink, 
for to-morrow we die," in the midst of rail- 
roads, spinning-jennies, electric telegraphs, 
and crystal palaces, with infinite blue-books 
and scientific treatises ready to prove to 
them, what they knew perfectly well already, 
that they were making a very unprofitable 
investment, both of money and of time. 

For science indeed is great : but she is 
not the greatest. She is an instrument, and 
not a power ; beneficent or deadly, according 
as she is wielded by the hand of virtue or 
of vice. But her lawful mistress, the only 
one which can use her aright, the only one 
under whom she can truly grow, and prosper, 
and prove her divine descent, is Virtue, the 



58 THE LIMITS OP EXACT SCIENCE 

likeness of Almighty God. This, indeed, 
the Hebrew Prophets, who knew no science 
in one sense of the word, do not expressly 
say : but it is a corollary from their doctrine, 
which we may discover for ourselves, if we 
will look at the nations round us now, if we 
will look at all the nations which have been. 
Even Voltaire himself acknowledged that; 
and when he pointed to the Chinese as the 
most prosperous nation upon earth, ascribed 
their prosperity uniformly to their virtue. 
"We now know that he was wrong in fact : 
for we have discovered that Chinese civiliza- 
tion is one not of peace and plenty, but of 
anarchy and wretchedness. But that fact 
only goes to corroborate the belief, which 
(strange juxtaposition!) was common to Vol- 
taire and the old Hebrew Prophets at whom 
he scoffed, namely, that virtue is wealth, and 
vice is ruin. For we have found that these 
Chinese, the ruling classes of them at least, are 
an especially unrighteous people; rotting upon 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 59 

the rotting remnants of the wisdom and vir- 
tue of their forefathers, which now lives only 
on their lips in flowery maxims about justice 
and mercy and truth, as a cloak for practical 
hypocrisy and villany ; and we have dis- 
covered also, as a patent fact, just what the 
Hebrew Prophets would have foretold us — 
that the miseries and horrors which are now 
destroying the Chinese Empire, are the direct 
and organic results of the moral profligacy 
of its inhabitants. 

I know no modern nation, moreover, which 
illustrates so forcibly as China the great his- 
toric law which the Hebrew Prophets pro- 
claim ; and that is this: — That as the pros- 
perity of a nation is the correlative of their 
morals, so are their morals the correlative of 
their theology. As a people behaves, so it 
thrives; as it believes, so it behaves. Such 
as his Gods are, such will the man be ; down 
to that lowest point which too many of the 
Chinese seem to have reached, where, having 



y 



60 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

no Gods, lie himself becomes no man; but 
(as I hear you see him at the Australian 
diggings) abhorred for his foul crimes even 
by the scum of Europe. 

I do not say that the theology always pro- 
duces the morals, any more than that the 
morals always produces the theology. Each 
is, I think, alternately cause and effect. Men 
make the Gods in their own likeness; then 
they copy the likeness they have set up. But 
whichever be cause, and whichever effect, the 
law, I believe, stands true, that on the two 
together depend the physical welfare of a 
people. History gives us many examples, in 
which superstition, many again in which pro- 
fligacy, have been the patent cause of a na- 
tion's degradation. It does not, as far as I 
am aware, give us a single case of a nation's 
thriving and developing when deeply infected 
with either of those two vices. 

These, the broad and simple law^s of moral 
retribution, we may see in history; and 



AS APPLIED TO HISTOEY. 61 

(I hope) something more than them; some- 
thing of a general method, something of an 
upward progress, though any thing but an 
irresistible or inequitable one. For I have / 
not argued that there is no order, no pro- 
gress — God forbid. Were there no order to 
be found, what could the student with a 
man's reason in him do, but in due time go 
mad? — Were there no progress, what could 
the student with a man's heart within him do, 
but in due time break his heart, over the sight 
of a chaos of folly and misery irredeemable? — 
I only argue that the order and the progress y 
of human history cannot be similar to those 
which govern irrational beings, and cannot 
(without extreme danger) be described by 
metaphors (for they are nothing stronger) 
drawn from physical science. If there be an 
order, a progress, they must be moral; fit for 
the guidance of moral beings; limited by the 
obedience which those moral beings pay to 
what they know. 



62 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

And such an order, such a progress as 
that, I have good hope that we shall find in 
history. 

We shall find, as I believe, in all the ages, 
God educating man; protecting him till he 
can go alone, furnishing him with the pri- 
mary necessaries, teaching him, guiding him, 
inspiring him, as we should do to our children ; 
bearing with him, and forgiving him too, 
again and again, as we should do : but teach- 
ing him withal (as we shall do if we be wise) 
in great part by his own experience, making 
him test for himself, even by failure and pain, 
the truth of the laws which have been given 
him; discover for himself, as much as possi- 
ble, fresh laws, or fresh applications of laws ; 
and exercising his will and faculties, by trust- 
ing him to himself wherever he can be trusted 
without his final destruction. This is my 
conception of history, especially of Modern 
History — of history since the Revelation of 
our Lord Jesus Christ. I express myself feebly 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 63 

enougli, I know. And even could I express 
what I mean perfectly, it would still be but a 
partial analogy, not to be pushed into details. 
As I said just now, were the true law of 
human progress revealed to us to-morrow, we 
could not understand it. 

For suppose that the theory were true, 
which Dr Temple of Rugby has lately put 
into such noble words : suppose that, as he 
says, "The power whereby the present ever 
gathers into itself the results of the past, 
transforms the human race into a colossal man, 
whose life reaches from the creation to the 
day of judgment. The successive generations 
of men, are days in this man's hfe. The dis- 
coveries and inventions which characterize the 
different epochs of the world, are this man s 
works. The creeds and doctrines, the opinions 
and principles of the successive ages, are his 
thoughts. The state of society at different 
times, are his manners. He grows in know- 
ledge, in self-control, in visible size, just as we 



64 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

do." Suppose all this; and suppose too, that 
God is educating this his colossal child, as we 
educate our own children ; it will hardly fol- 
low from thence that his education would be, 
as Dr Temple says it is, precisely similar to 
ours. 

Analogous it may be, but not precisely 
similar ; and for this reason : That the collec- 
tive man, in the theory, must be infinitely 
more complex in his organization than the 
individuals of which he is composed. "While 
between the educator of the one and of the 
other, there is simply the difference between 
a man and God. How much more complex 
then must his education be ! how all-inscru- 
table to human minds much in it ! — often 
as inscrutable as would our training of our 
children seem to the bird brooding over her 
young ones in the nest. The parental rela- 
tions in all three cases may be — the Scriptures 
say that they are — expansions of the same 
great law ; the key to all history may be con- 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 65 

talned in those great words — "How often 
would I have gathered thy children as a hen 
gathereth her chickens under her wings." Yet 
even there, the analogy stops short — *'but 
thou wouldest not" expresses a new element, 
which has no place in the training of the 
nesthng by the dam, though it has place in 
our training of our children ; even that self- 
will, that power of disobedience, which is the 
dark side of man's prerogative as a rational 
and self-cultivating being. Here that analogy 
fails, as we should have expected it to do; 
and in a hundred other points it fails, or rather 
transcends so utterly its original type, that 
mankind seems, at moments, the mere puppet 
of those laws of natural selection, and com- 
petition of species, of which we have heard so 
much of late ; and, to give a single instance, 
the seeming waste, of human thought, of hu- 
man agony, of human power, seems but an- 
other instance of that inscrutable prodigality 
of nature, by which, of a thousand acorns 



66 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

dropping to the ground, but one shall become 
the thing it can become, and grow into a 
builder oak, the rest be craunched up by the 
nearest swine. 

Yet these dark passages of human life 
may be only necessary elements of the com- 
plex education of our race; and as much 
mercy under a fearful shape, as ours when 
we put the child we love under the surgeon's 
knife. At least we may believe so; believe 
that they have a moral end, though that end 
be unseen by us ; and without any rash or 
narrow prying into final causes (a trick as 
fatal to historic research as Bacon said it was 
to science), we may justify God by faith, 
where we cannot justify Him by experience. 

Surely this will be the philosophic method. 
If we seem to ourselves to have discovered 
a law, we do not throw it away the moment 
we find phsenomena which will not be ex- 
plained by it. We use those phaenomena to 
correct and to expand our law. And this 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 67 

belief that History is "God educating man," 
is no mere hypothesis; it results from the 
observation of thousands of minds, through- 
out thousands of years. It has long seemed 
— I trust it will seem still — the best expla- 
nation of the strange deeds of that strange 
being man: and where we find in history 
facts which seem to contradict it, we shall 
not cast away rashly or angrily either it or 
them : but if we be Bacon's true disciples, 
we shall use them patiently and reverently 
to correct and expand our notions of the law 
itself, and rise thereby to more deep and just 
conceptions of education, of man, and — it may 
be — of God Himself. 

In proportion as we look at history thus ; 
searching for efiective, rather than final causes, 
and content to see God working everywhere, 
without impertinently demanding of Him a 
reason for His deeds, we shall study in a 
frame of mind equally removed from super- 
stition on the one hand, and necessitarianism 



68 T5E LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

on the other. We shall not be afraid to con- 
fess natural agencies : but neither shall we be 
afraid to confess those supernatural causes 
which underlie all existence, save God's 
alone. 

We shall talk of more than of an over- 
ruling Providence. That such exists, will 
seem to us a patent fact. But it will seem to 
us somewhat Manichsean to believe that the 
world is ill made, mankind a failure, and that 
all God has to do with them, is to set them 
right here and there, when they go intole- 
rably wrong. We shall believe not merely 
in an over-ruling Providence, but (if I may 
dare to coin a word) in an under-ruling one, 
which has fixed for mankind eternal laws of 
life, health, growth, both physical and spiri- 
tual; in an around-ruling Providence, like- 
wise, by which circumstances, that which 
stands around a man, are perpetually arrang- 
ed, it may be, are fore-ordained, so that each 
law shall have at least an opportunity of 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 69 

taking effect on the right person, in the right 
time and place; and in an in-ruhng Provi- 
dence, too, from whose inspiration comes all 
true thought, all right feeling; from whom, we 
must believe, man alone of all living things 
known to us inherits that mysterious faculty 
of perceiving the law beneath the phenomena, 
by virtue of which, he is a man. 

But we can hold all this, surely, and 
equally hold all which natural science may 
teach us. Hold what natural science teaches ? 
We shall not dare not to hold it. It will be 
sacred in our eyes. All Hght which science, 
political, economic, physiological, or other, can 
throw upon the past, will be welcomed by 
us, as coming from the Author of all light. 
To ignore it, even to receive it suspiciously 
and grudgingly, we shall feel to be a sin 
against Him. We shall dread no " inroads of 
materiahsm;" because we shall be standing 
upon that spiritual ground which underUes — 
ay, causes — the material. All discoveries 



70 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE 

of science, whether political or economic, whe- 
ther laws of health or laws of climate, will 
be accepted trustfully and cheerfully. And 
when we meet with such startling speculations 
as those on the influence of climate, soil, scenery 
on national character, which have lately excited 
so much controversy, we shall welcome them 
at first sight, just because they give us hope 
of order where we had seen only disorder, 
law where we fancied chance : we shall verify 
them patiently; correct them if they need 
correction; and if proven, believe that they 
have worked, and still work, ovk dvev Beoy, 
as factors in the great method of Him who 
has appointed to all nations their times, and 
the bounds of their habitation, if haply they 
might feel after Him, and find Him : though 
He be not far from any one of them ; for in 
Him we live, and move, and have our being, 
and are the offspring of God Himself. 

I thus end what it seemed to me proper 
to say in this, my Inaugural Lecture ; thank- 



AS APPLIED TO HISTORY. 71 

ing you much for the patience with which you 
have heard me : and if I have in it too often 
spoken of myself, and my own opinions, I can 
only answer that it is a fault which has been 
forced on me by my position, and which will 
not occur again. It seemed to me that some 
sort of statement of my belief was necessary, 
if only from respect to a University from 
which I have been long separated, and to 
return to which is to me a high honour and a 
deep pleasure; and I cannot but be aware 
(it is best to be honest) that there exists a 
prejudice against me in the minds of better 
men than I am, on account of certain early 
writings of mine. That prejudice, I trust, 
with God's help, I shall be able to dissipate. 
At least whatever I shall fail in doing, this 
University will find that I shall do one thing; 
and that is, obey the Apostolic precept, 
"Study to be quiet, and to do your own 
business.'* 

I have now to announce, that my lectures 



72 THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE. 

will commence the first week in next Febru- 
ary, and be spread over the Lent and Easter 
terms ; and that, meanwhile, if any Under- 
graduates wish to become members of my 
Class, I shall be most happy to see them 
at my own house, on Mondays, "Wednes- 
days, or Fridays, at the hour of twelve, and 
tell them what books it seems to me they 
ought to read : always premising, that Gib- 
bon, whether I may agree or disagree with 
him in details, will form the text-book on 
which they will be examined by me. 



CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 



I^^/'S'^ 



